Philips and Health Language Team Up

VIENNA, Austria - Royal Philips Electronics and Health Language launched a technology initiative to advance system interoperability in healthcare with the help of speech recognition. The companies aim to automate the conversion of free text into medical terminology to enable direct storage in the electronic medical record (EMR). A prototype solution extracts information from freely dictated text and allocates it to the corresponding fields.

Interop 6.1 extracts findings, diagnoses, drugs, allergies and other relevant information from dictated reports. The information is formatted for upload to the EMR. The solution generates codes that support the classification of medical conditions and the structuring of clinical data, such as the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes and the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) codes.

Interop 6.1 also identifies medical terms from the history of present illnesses (HPI) to be indexed in the EMR. The indexed terms can be used for statistical evaluation, thus helping to improve hospital procedures related to patient safety, medication and continuity of care.

Philips' document creation platform SpeechMagic is installed at more than 8,000 professional sites in 45 nations, supports 23 speech recognition languages, and provides more than 150 specific recognition vocabularies. HLI's Language Engine is built on experience gathered from projects with healthcare IT providers as well as healthcare organizations such as the UK's National Health Service (NHS).